{"id":2435,"date":"2008-05-24T10:24:36","date_gmt":"2008-05-24T14:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2435"},"modified":"2008-05-24T10:24:36","modified_gmt":"2008-05-24T14:24:36","slug":"friendfeed-kill-twitter-not-going-to-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/05\/24\/friendfeed-kill-twitter-not-going-to-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"FriendFeed kill Twitter? Not going to happen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So Duncan Riley &#8212; formerly of TechCrunch &#8212; has a post up at his new site Inquisitr about how it&#8217;s time for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.inquisitr.com\/its-time-for-friendfeed-to-kill-twitter\">FriendFeed to kill Twitter<\/a>. I have nothing against Duncan, but every time I see a headline like that on a blog post I almost instinctively discount whatever appears in the post. Why? Because those kinds of &#8220;X is going to kill X&#8221; headlines are almost always Techmeme bait or Digg bait. It&#8217;s like those headlines in the business section of the newspaper that talk about the stock market &#8220;plummeting&#8221; or companies &#8220;hemorrhaging&#8221; red ink. Hyperbole sells.<\/p>\n<p>The probability of FriendFeed &#8220;killing&#8221; Twitter is roughly zero. And not just because FriendFeed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2008\/05\/24\/friendfeed-still-has-a-lot-of-killing-to-do\/\">doesn&#8217;t have the scale<\/a> yet to mount an assault. The two services are also a lot more complimentary than they are competitive, as more than one person commenting on this topic (many of them on FriendFeed) <a href=\"http:\/\/friendfeed.com\/e\/bca6ff6d-4af7-7a4f-aeba-197ae3743ffe\">has mentioned<\/a>. FriendFeed is an aggregator, and Twitter is not. Could FriendFeed add messaging? Sure it could. But it still wouldn&#8217;t kill Twitter. Lots of people thought that Twitter would help to kill Facebook (or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.informationweek.com\/blog\/main\/archives\/2007\/09\/facebook_could_1.html\">vice versa<\/a>), and Facebook was supposed to kill MySpace, and MySpace was allegedly going to kill blogs. And <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2007\/09\/22\/googles_plans_to_kill_facebook.html\">so on<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, some services thrive and others don&#8217;t &#8212; Friendster being a good example (although even it has come <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2008\/04\/06\/startups-rose-back-from-dead\/\">back from the dead<\/a> to some extent). But that&#8217;s rarely because some other service &#8220;kills&#8221; them. It&#8217;s usually because they fail to keep up with what their customers want, or fail to adapt to some new technology, or run out of money. Twitter&#8217;s biggest problem <a href=\"http:\/\/quotably.com\/search\/friendfeed%20kill%20twitter\/page\/2\">isn&#8217;t FriendFeed<\/a>, it&#8217;s keeping the service running properly so that people don&#8217;t get irritated enough by all the downtime and stop using it. And even that is a pretty high hurdle: for all the bitching about Twitter being down, it still seems to be pretty popular. And FriendFeed has its own issues to worry about, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sarahintampa.com\/sarah\/2008\/05\/20\/is-friendfeed-doomed.html\">some would argue<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>For bonus points (or maybe the booby prize), check out another of Steve Gillmor&#8217;s classic, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2008\/05\/24\/blame-friendfeed\/\">incomprehensible rants<\/a> on the topic over at TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Duncan Riley &#8212; formerly of TechCrunch &#8212; has a post up at his new site Inquisitr about how it&#8217;s time for FriendFeed to kill Twitter. I have nothing against Duncan, but every time I see a headline like that on a blog post I almost instinctively discount whatever appears in the post. Why? Because &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/05\/24\/friendfeed-kill-twitter-not-going-to-happen\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;FriendFeed kill Twitter? Not going to happen&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}